Victoria
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It’s hard to get out of bed, sometimes.
Honestly, pretty much every day, I have to put in a ton of mental effort into bringing myself to start the day instead of simply… sleeping forever.
The constant name-calling just gets to me. No one looks at me like an equal, virtually no one actually wants to talk to me.
All because of that stupid rumor.
The worst thing is, I don’t even know who started it. It got posted on that dumb ‘school confessions’ Instagram account a student here made. It’s especially popular with my grade, because eighth graders are just stupid, I guess. All the submissions are anonymous, sent in through a Google Forms accessible through the account’s About, and then posted as screenshots by the secret owner of the account. There’s not really much that make those so-called ‘confessions’, well... ‘confessions’. It’s really just people talking crap about others behind others’ back, as well as kids shipping their classmates together—or shipping themselves with their classmates, who knows? Either way, you get the point, it’s kind of a load of hot garbage.
I actually didn’t even know about it until recently. It was my older sister, Lisa, who showed it to me. She’s in her last year of high school, and very involved in her school life in general. She’s a part of the student council, and quite beloved by her peers. In the eyes of pretty much everyone, she’s super responsible, smart, and kind. At home, though, she’s a bit different. I wouldn’t say she’s wild, a total slob, or anything extreme like that, but she’s at least not the goody-two-shoes she’s built up her reputation to be. She hangs out a lot on social media and has a ton of online friends she games with regularly. Honestly, Lisa and I aren’t exactly thick as thieves or anything, but she is chill with me in general, I’d say.
She was decent enough to point out that one post from the ‘confessions’ account to me.
She walked into my room one evening while I was watching YouTube.
“Hey, Dylan? Can I show you something really quickly?”
“Yeah, what is it?”
She approached me, slightly hiding her phone’s screen from my view. “So... Do you know the school confessions account? On Instagram?”
“No, what’s that?”
She then briefly explained the concept of it to me.
“Okay, so, what about it?” I asked, slightly worried.
“Well, in the latest post... I mean, I’m not sure that it’s about you, but... I think it might be.”
She showed me her screen.
The grade 8 guy with the long hair is such a fag
My heart dropped.
“Do you know any other boys in your grade with long hair? I might be worried for nothing, but...”
I thought for a second, praying that I could think of someone, anyone other than me, but... “No, they all have it short. Or at least way shorter than me, I guess.”
“Oh. Yeah, that’s what I thought...”
“It... It doesn’t say who wrote that, right?”
“No, it’s all anonymous,” she repeated. “But there are probably a few comments...” She tapped on the icon to open the comment section. “Oh god.”
There weren’t a ton of comments, but a good handful, nonetheless.
ikr lmao
he looks like a girl tbh
i dont know about that but its actually embarrassing how emo he is
I didn’t want to read the rest that followed.
“I swear, I’m gonna spam each one of these assholes with gay porn, see if they like that,” growled Lisa, pulling her phone out of my view and tapping her screen with fury.
“No, don’t,” I quickly replied, grabbing her wrist. She looked down at me in confusion.
“Why not?”
“It’s not your problem. If you do that, they’ll figure I told you to, since I’m your brother, and it’ll just attract more negative attention to me...”
“Don’t worry, I’ll make an alt. They won’t know it’s me.”
“Lisa, no,” I insisted.
“Fine, fine,” she sighed. “Several alts.”
“Just don’t. I don’t want you to.”
“But-” She sighed again. “Don’t you want to at least report this to the school?”
“It’s not worth it. They don’t even know who posted it.”
“But they can find out! Or like, shut it down. I’m sure of it.”
“It’s not your problem, Lisa. Please.”
She frowned. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
She paused, looking at me with concern. I held my ground.
“If you say so,” she sighed, finally, heading back to her room and closing my door behind her.
I shrunk into my seat, spinning my chair around a few times in an attempt to calm my nerves. It didn’t help. I turned on my monitor and opened Discord.
I started a voice call, which he joined in less than a second.
“What’s up?” he began.
“So basically, other eighth graders are calling me a fag on Insta, and I’m freaking out ‘cause I dunno what to do.”
“Oh, damn. Maybe report it to your school?
“I don’t wanna, it’ll just attract negative attention on me. Besides, I doubt the school actually cares.”
He took a second to reply. “Hmm… I don’t know what else you could do then, honestly.”
“Yeah.” I paused. He didn’t say anything. “Lisa wants to spam gay porn to them,” I added, grinning.
Camilo burst into laughter. “Oh my god. She should.”
“Nooo,” I whined. “She could get found out, or something.”
“Would be funny though.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“What’s wrong with your school, anyway? Why would they say that about you?”
“Well, I dunno. Guess I look gay to them.”
“Kids are weird,” he sighed.
“Hey, you’re only two years older.”
“At least I’m graduating this year. Won’t have to deal with these losers anymore.”
“Good for you,” I sighed, smiling.
I felt slightly better, having somewhat gotten the issue of my chest, but… It felt as if I wasn’t telling him the whole truth, in a way. Which was kind of the case.
It was no mystery to me why kids might think I was gay. And it wasn’t just because of my hair. It’s because I am, and not in the way you might think I am, at this point. I’m not a boy like everyone thinks I am. I’m a girl, a trans girl. And I like girls.
I’m guessing the person responsible for the original rumor, along with most kids in my school, equate any form of femininity to liking men, but in my case, that’s not it at all.
At the start of the whole rumor debacle, I had already known for a little while. ‘A little while’ being no less than a month. Clearly, I hadn’t come out to my sister, or even my best online friend, so far, much less my parents or my school. But in the time that it took me to figure everything out and after that, I had grown comfortable with the online LGBTQ+ community.
Long story short—not really—if I retrace my steps to the very beginning, it all went something like this:
I had just joined this anime server that Camilo had recommended to me, and, somewhere in there, I think in my introduction, admitted that BNA and Beastars were two of my favourite animes. In truth, I’ve always kind of liked anthropomorphic animals since I was a kid, and otherwise just liked the stories of both shows. However, someone replied something along the lines of “lol furry” to that, and I, having no idea what that was supposed to mean, looked it up.
I quickly descended the rabbit hole of information and, most of all, furry art made available to me through that simple search. And honestly, I really liked the whole concept of it. As I said, I’ve always had a bit of an interest in anthropomorphic animals, so I just found it cool that such a community existed. Wanting to know more, I looked for a public furry server on Discord, picking the one that was most to my liking at first glance—The Furry Pawsmos.
To be honest, I didn’t really do much there. Even online, I wasn’t really the type to be social with people I didn’t know, unless I was being introduced to someone by a friend. I mostly scrolled through the channels and latest messages in each one.
In one, named “lgbt-questioning” and destined for asking questions about LGBTQ+ in general, I saw a lot of people mentioning being trans, or asking questions about it. I wasn’t too familiar with the concept of it, and it piqued my interest. I couldn’t help but want to know more. Through a new Google search, I soon found myself going down another rabbit hole, one that led me to a life-changing discovery.
I had heard about transgender people before, but I didn’t know the details whatsoever. And through discovering them, I discovered myself.
Inside, I’ve never felt like a boy, really. I guess I can’t say I’ve felt a ton of discomfort with my body, but I’ve always disliked being categorized as a boy. In primary school, all my best friends were girls. I was never able to for the life of me play sports to try to integrate the guy friend groups. I never admitted it to anyone, but I’d always wished I was just like the girls my age, that I could have long, pretty hair and paint my nails. There was this one girl in my class when I was in third grade that looked a lot like me, a ‘girl version’ of me, according to the other kids. We became close friends, pretty much just because we both liked playing pretend during recess. After a certain point, the other kids would ship us together, thinking we would become a couple, just because we looked similar. Because of this, I developed what I thought was a crush on her, but looking back now, was a lot closer to admiration. She wasn’t as conventionally feminine as the other girls in our grade, she wouldn’t wear skirts or dresses or like the colour pink, but I desperately wanted to look like her.
Looking back on this and more, I came to see myself in many stories that I read from other trans people talking about how they felt about themselves. I started to think of the name I wanted to use as a girl, how I wanted to transition, and rethought my sexuality. I shortened my username on Discord while I waited to come out to my closer online friends like Cam and joined a few LGBTQ+ servers.
In short, I was growing more and more comfortable with the idea of being trans every day at that point, but still hadn’t come out to my family or Cam. Even though he’s been my best friend since I got on Discord, I still don’t really know how he might react to finding out about me. I don’t really know where he stands on trans people, in general. I mean… He did mention thinking he could be bisexual, and how he had told his now ex-girlfriend about it, but that’s the only time he’d ever mentioned anything LGBT-related. And being bi is totally different from being trans, so I had no way of knowing if he’d accept me…
After a few minutes of listening to Cam typing away on his ridiculously loud keyboard, I heard his voice again. “Oh yeah. Speaking of gay stuff, I went to the GSA at my school the other day.”
My face lit up. “Oh, really? What was it like?”
I could hear the smile in his voice. “So like, it was kind of weird at first, ‘cause I didn’t really know what was going on, and everything, but the person in charge there was actually really chill, and explained everything to me that I didn’t understand. His name’s Corey, he’s a gay transgender boy, and like actually really cute in my opinion, and, well, super nice and everything. And at the end of the meet-up, I got his Discord, and we even took the same bus home together. So, it was really fun.”
“That’s really cool,” I replied. My heart started to race. What if I came out to him? Right here, right now? I thought to myself.
It took more than just that thought to get me to finally go for it. Camilo kept talking about the boy he’d met, describing how they had played a video game together, or something. I can’t even recall the details of it, or even the name of the game, because I was so busy trying to figure out how I could tell him. I remember thinking it was one of the most stressful moments of my life so far.
At one point, he either paused or finished his happy rant, and I forced the words out of my mouth.
“Hey, can I… tell you something important?”
“Yeah, sure. What’s up?”
No going back now, I thought. “So… It’s been awhile that I’ve, kinda known, but I was never really sure if I should like, tell you or not, and never found the right time, or whatever. I’ve thought a lot about it and I’ve figured out that I’m a trans girl.”
I felt my heart pounding in my chest as he spoke up. “Oh, seriously? That’s cool, I’m glad you told me.”
I swallowed, nervous. “It doesn’t bother you?”
“No, of course not. I’m totally fine with it. You’re my best friend and I don’t care about your gender, I’ll support you no matter what, y’know.”
“Thank you,” I managed to reply, smiling widely.
“No problem. What name and pronouns should I use for you?”
“Uh, she/her. And… it might change later, but I think I like Victoria.”
“Cool. Good to know.”
Needless to say, I went to bed in a rather peppy mood that night. I’d completely forgotten about what might be awaiting me at school.
The buzz seemingly still hadn’t worn off the next day when I woke up, despite the fact I was not at all a morning person. I replayed last night in my head over and over again, a warmth enveloping my heart every time—up until the moment I set foot in class.
I was the last to arrive before the bell rang. It was nothing unusual for me, but this time, instead of being generally ignored, I felt quite a lot of stares fall upon me, almost piercing through me. I somehow managed to force myself over to my usual seat and sit down.
It’s not like they kept looking at me like that for the rest of the period, much less the entire day. They obviously had better things to do, like pay attention to the lesson at hand. I, however, barely could, paranoid that at least one pair of eyes could be on me at any given moment, worried about what was to come once the period ended.
Now, it’s been two weeks since that day, and as time passed, it just got worse. It’s never escalated to anything physical, but I started to hear whispers in the hallways and in the bus after school. Words like ‘gay’ or ‘weirdo’ follow me on a daily basis. School became an absolute pain.
Thankfully, I finally get a break from it back at home. I game for hours with Camilo and by myself, spend my nights watching YouTube, anything to stop thinking about school. I constantly dread going to bed, because it only makes the moment I have to go back there seem closer. Last week, I started staying up in bed on my phone, as long as my body could tolerate before falling asleep on its own. I spend some nights on my computer while sitting at my desk, which used to make it a lot harder to fall asleep, so it took longer. The first few times I did that were all-nighters; but after a while, I started passing out on my desk nonetheless.
At one point, in a voice call with Cam, he asks me:
“By the way, are you doing okay, lately?”
I hesitate. “Yeah. Why do you ask?”
“Well… You sound a lot more tired recently, I guess.”
“Oh… Yeah, I’m not sleeping a lot these days.”
“How come?”
“I just… don’t feel like it.”
“Oh. Okay then.” He pauses. “Well, you know, if ever you wanna talk to me about anything, I’m here for you.”
I’m sure he could sense something was up, even without seeing me. He’s known me for ages now. “Yeah, I know. Thanks.”
Later that day, after supper, Lisa comes to see me in my room.
“Hey, Dylan?” she says quietly, pushing open my door softly.
I quickly type a ‘hold on brb’ to the friend I’m texting and minimise the Discord window, spinning my chair around to face her. “Yeah?”
She closes the door behind her, biting her lip. “Um, so, I wanted to check on you, sort of. If that’s okay.”
“Why?”
“Well, while we were eating, I noticed that you kept falling asleep...”
“Oh.”
“Are you alright?
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Are you sure? Because...” She pauses, going to sit on my bed. “Ever since I showed you the confession thing, you’ve seemed really down, and stuff. I’ve been really busy with studying for exams lately and haven’t been able to find a time to bring it up, but… Did something happen at school, like, related to that post?”
I can’t bring myself to answer. My vision blurs as my eyes fill with tears. I know that if I say a word, I would start to cry for real. I look down, hiding my eyes with my bangs as I try to blink away my tears.
“Dylan?”
I finally nod, wiping away my tears as more come to replace them.
“Oh god, Dylan…”
“They’re all saying it. That I’m gay, and that I’m weird,” I manage to say in between sobs.
“Oh, Dylan… I’m so sorry. Come here,” she says, gesturing to sit next to her. I do, and she hugs me tightly as I cry harder in her arms.
“I’m— I’m so tired. I d-don’t want to go to school anymore,” I sob.
“It’s okay, it’s gonna be okay,” she reassures me. “They’re just saying whatever. It’s not true, anyway.”
I sniffle, my grip on her loosening. “B-but, it is.”
She pulls away slightly, surprised. “It is?”
“Yeah. I mean, no, but like…” I try to calm my breathing. “I like girls, but… I’m a girl. I’m transgender.”
Her eyes widen. “Oh, okay. So…” She hesitates. “Wow. I had no idea.”
I sniffle, wiping away my tears.
“It’s okay though. I mean, I’m fine with that.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I don’t mind. It’s just sort of a surprise.”
“Well, I just kind of understood it all a bit more than a month ago.” I sniffle again, in response to which Lisa reaches to grab a box of tissues resting on my night table. “I’m still not sure about my name, but I think I like Victoria,” I add, taking a tissue and attempting to clean myself up.
“So, basically, you wanna be a girl and you’ve chosen the name Victoria, is what you’re saying?”
“Um, yeah. I don’t want to be a girl though. It’s more like, I feel that way. I am a girl inside.”
“Ah, okay.” She nods slowly, taking it in. “But you said you still are into girls?”
“Mm-hmm. I mean, more precisely… just romantically. I don’t think I really have… any sexual attraction.”
“Oh, okay, isn’t that like, asexual?”
I nod. “Yeah.”
“I see, well…” She hesitates, sighing softly and averting her gaze from mine. “It’s a lot to take in. I’ve had a few friends that are, like trans and whatever, and asexual, LGBT in general, but I guess I never expected you would be,” she explains, looking back to me and smiling softly. “But I’m cool with it. As long as you’re happy, I’m happy for you… Victoria.”
Hearing the sound of my name in real life, from my sister, feels nearly ten times better than when Camilo says it. I can’t help but smile like an idiot and hug her tightly.
“Thanks, Lisa. I love you.”
She returns my embrace. “I love you too.”